


Love's Red Rose is Ripping through your Skin

by natcat5



Series: Dark Month 2015 [3]
Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Gen, Gore, disturbing imagery, finishing school, mermaid au, self mutilation, victorian au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 15:43:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4925458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/natcat5/pseuds/natcat5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing quite like watching someone you care about tear themselves apart for love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love's Red Rose is Ripping through your Skin

**Author's Note:**

> Some unfortunate callbacks to Anderson's original tale.

There’s blood on the floor again.

Kyouko glowers at it, as if the force of her gaze could will it out of existence. She could scorch it away, if she really tried, but that would leave a blackened mark on the hardwood, and then _she_ would be in trouble.

The other girls they share the room with haven’t returned. Or rather, are doing what good girls are supposed to and attending evening mass. But Kyouko doesn’t go to mass unless she’s dragged by her ears, and the sisters have long since stopped trying. She is here to become a non-destructive member of society, conversion is a secondary goal, and as long as she’s not setting anything on fire, it’s alright if it isn’t immediately achieved.

Kyouko hasn’t bothered to tell anyone she is a born Catholic, and that she follows her father’s teachings rather than that of the corrupt Vatican church. She prays on her own time, in places of her own choosing. But that’s nobody’s business but her own.

She usually spends the time when the other girls are at mass writing letters to her sister, or letting a little of her fire out, in the privacy of the empty room. But there’ll be none of that now. Not when there’s a trail of darkened splotches leading from a bed near the window towards the shared washing up area.

 _Goddammit Sayaka._ Kyouko grits her teeth, lifts her skirts so she doesn’t trip or drag them through the blood, and hurries.

Sayaka is sitting on a stool beside the washing basin, her skirts and petticoats rolled up, her hands shakily holding a blood-stained wet cloth, wiping at the mess below her waist. Her legs, half fused together, with her white stockings still between them. The area below her knees is free, legs separate from one another, but bloody and gouged, scales and skin hanging off in clumps where she’s clearly hacked at the area with a knife.

“God _dammit,_ Sayaka,” Kyouko hisses out loud, rushing into the room, “What the fuck is this? You said it wasn’t happening anymore!”

Sayaka looks up, her face streaked with tears. There’s a pained crease between her eyes, but her expression is a familiar one. Stubborn, unrelenting, unapologetic. Even as she holds the gore-covered knife over the part of her thighs that are still fused together.

“This is nothing,” she says, voice wavering, “I’ve nearly got it separate again. J-just calm down would you? I’ll have it separate in a second.”

There are bloodstains all up the puffed sleeves of her blue dress, and collecting in a pool below where she’s sitting. This is, quite possibly, the worst Kyouko has ever found her. Her tail tried to reform with alarming frequency when Sayaka had first enrolled in the finishing school, but she had always insisted on the shifts being minor enough for her to take care of it herself.

Prissy, self-righteous, Sayaka. Who rubbed elbows with the headmistress’s daughter, and the fae princess who was the darling of the academy. Kyouko would never have pegged her as having enough mettle to hack apart her own tail in order to keep her place at the school, to maintain the illusion of being human. But she had, every time. Taken the knife with her own hands, split apart the newly grown skin, pulled off the scales, and forced her tail in two, then slimmed it down further to shove her raw and scalped legs into stockings and hose.

Sayaka hid it from the other girls, the fae and the sprites and the nymphs, who all had an easy time pretending to be human, physically. Wings tucked tight, powder to hide skin discoloration, and glasses to conceal anything unusual in the eyes. They all thought she was a water sprite; she couldn’t be anything but. Mermaids couldn’t join assimilation academies like the Incubation Institution. Their physical differences were too drastic, their affinity for water too strong.

But Kyouko had found her out, her predilection to never be where she was expected to causing her to turn up in the dormitory at times Sayaka had thought she’d be alone. Kyouko was a fire sprite, half-ifrit, but her father’s bloody past had made her intimately familiar with the smell of blood. The scent led her to Sayaka time and time again, no matter how hard the mermaid tried to hide when she was tearing herself apart.

And she always said the same thing, every single time Kyouko confronted her.

It’s an easy thing, she always said. She had a highly accelerated healing factor, and would be fine within the hour. It didn’t even hurt. She didn’t feel anything at all. It was just a minor cut, and she could handle it.

But this isn’t minor. This looks like her legs fused together in their entirety, all the way down to her ankles. Kyouko can see remains of blue-green scales scattered around her feet. Some on the floor, and some still attached to her skin by thin threads of translucent flesh. The smell of blood is overwhelming.

“Sayaka, _no,”_ Kyouko snaps, grabbing at the knife in the other girl’s hand, ignoring the irritated hiss she gets in response. “No! You need to give this up. You’re tail’s just going to keep coming back- you can’t keep doing this, someone’ll find out, or worse, you’ll just bleed out one of these days. Shit, I should have told the sisters about this months ago, look at you! You’re going to kill yourself-”

“I can take care of myself!” snaps Sayaka, awkwardly trying to stay balanced on the stool while keeping the knife away from Kyouko. Her feet are sliding on the blood-slicked ground. “Don’t you dare, Kyouko! If you tell, they’ll kick me out, and I-I won’t be able to-,”

Her voice breaks on a sob, the hand holding the knife shaking. Kyouko’s face is dark as she stares at her, but she ceases her attempts to grab the knife, stepping back and regarding the other girl with a grim expression.

“Is he really worth all this?” she asks quietly, nose still wrinkled in distaste, against the scent of blood, against the scene before her. “This boy that you love so much?”

Because it has to be that, Kyouko thinks. The fae girl with the unsettling eyes had hinted at it, completely unprompted, at dinner. That Sayaka was destroying herself for a boy. If it had been anyone other than Homura, who always seemed to know more than she let on, Kyouko would have disregarded it. But watching Sayaka’s expression twist in shock, and then into stubborn defensiveness, just confirms Homura’s vague allusions.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” Sayaka says, lips trembling, “Yes, yes he is. Everyone says mermaids can’t do this, can’t interact with humans like the rest of you can. That it’s against our nature. B-but when he was sick, and he was staying by the sea, I’d go beneath his window and talk to him, and he’d play for me, and sometimes I’d sing-“

She sucks in a breath, one hand fisted into the cloth of her blood-stained dress, the other still curled around the knife.

“He didn’t know I wasn’t human,” she continues, eyes red, “We talked normally, like people would. He thought I lived near by. He could never see below my waist. And I- he healed, and I couldn’t go see him, because then he’d- he’d find out…”

She inhales sharply, knuckles white around the handle of the knife, before lifting her head to match her gaze to Kyouko’s. It’s unwavering, decided.

“I think we could be together, if I were human,” she says, voice firm, “He’s highborn, but if I graduate from here, I’ll get sponsored by a wealthy family. He’ll never have to know that I wasn’t human, and he- I-, he liked me, I know he did. I just- this _tail-,”_

It’s even more pathetic then Kyouko first expected. The boy in question didn’t even _ask_ her, or _demand_ that she do this, like Kyouko had suspected. Sayaka is doing this on the off-chance that this boy _might_ reciprocate her feelings if they’re the same species. But if she hasn’t seen this guy in months, since she’s been here, then he could have moved on, he could have forgotten about her. Hell, if he’s highborn, he could be _engaged_ by now.

“It’s bullshit to mutilate yourself like this for some guy,” Kyouko says flatly, “It’ll keep coming back. The hell you plan to do if you share a bed and it happens? Sayaka this is-,”

_Pathetic._

_Idiotic._

_Heartbreaking._

“Like I said,” Sayaka says, face turned away, stubborn, so damn stubborn. “I wouldn’t expect _you_ to understand.”

Then she returns to the task at hand. Hacking away at the fused skin of her thighs with her knife, like Kyouko’s watched her do a dozen times before. She was wearing stockings when her legs fused, so there’s cloth bonded to the skin and flesh she’s separating. It’s gruesome, but familiar. Because Kyouko helps, normally. Helps Sayaka clean up the mess afterwards, holds her hand while she hacks away. Sits by her as she mutilates herself. Runs a wet towel, heated secretly by her ifrit magic, down Sayaka’s raw, newly cut legs. Slow, and painstakingly gentle.

_I wouldn’t expect you to understand._

“That’s right,” Kyouko says hollowly, hands balling into fists at her side and smoke curling out from her clenched fingers, “What the hell would I know of love?”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I feel bad about this being short compared to the others, but this is how long these fics are _supposed_ to be.


End file.
